How to Hide Facebook Message Previews On Your Lock Screen

This brief article has been composed to show you how simple it can be to turn off notification previews for your Facebook account to prevent nosey people from reading your messages.

When you are signed into Messenger on your device, with each new message a preview will appear on your lock screen. While you rarely get the entire message, it still can allow prying eyes to learn who you are conversing with, as well as small pieces of the conversations you are having. Fortunately, there is a solution to keep this from happening.

An easy way to do this is simply to get into the settings on Facebook Messenger and deactivate message previews altogether, but there are some things that you need to understand about this choice:

You will no longer get any message previews from Facebook Messenger

Once deactivated, the only notification you receive will be the name of the sender.

Now that you know a little more about what you can expect with this setting modified, here is how you accomplish this feat.

Hiding Message Previews With iOS or Android Devices

While there might be very slight differences, the procedure to deactivate this default setting is relatively the same for both primary platforms.

Get into the Facebook Messenger app and choose the tab for “Settings” in the bottom right.

Choose Notifications, then Show Previews. From here, you can turn the feature off.

That’s it, now the future notifications you receive will get hidden on the lock screen of your device. You can see an example of this below.

Instead of the preview of the message like you might be used to seeing, your lock screen notification might read more like “Anthony sent you a message”.

Without the passcode to your phone, previewing or reading this entire message will be impossible👍.

Why Should You Hide Notification Previews For Your Lock Screen

You might not think about it, but someone can learn quite a few things about you through the small pieces of conversation they can read from your lock screen message previews. With the preview being lengthy enough to give readers the general idea of the content of the entire conversation, your privacy is at serious risk every time that you put down your phone for a minute and step away.

Worry not about your device not telling you about incoming messages, as Facebook Messenger will continue to behave in the same manner it always has, with the familiar tone and look. The only difference will be the lack of a message preview, which can help to protect your privacy. If your phone is password protected (as it certainly should be) there are no concerns about the wrong people reading conversations you are having.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, do not hesitate to drop a comment below so I can get in touch with you 📩.